Free New Jersey Noir by Joyce Carol Oates

on women everywhere,” said Miss Crawford.
    “You got that right.”
    Another time: “It’s like a club. The older cops, they’ve been in this club a long time, and they don’t necessarily welcome new members.”
    Miss Crawford had nodded at that, and just said, “These things take time.” Officer Joyce smiled, but Miss Crawford felt troubled in her mind. Here was a good girl and an honest officer, trying to do right, and the same old, same old was holding her back. Right here on these blocks of the Central Ward, Robbie down at the grocery still had police taking coffee and donuts in the morning, bags of potato chips and pretzels too, then just waving goodbye as they strolled past the register. The Shaw twins at the garage still changed the oil in officers’ private cars for nothing, and shopkeepers all up and down the streets still handed over contributions to the Widows and Orphans Fund. In cash.
    All that was down at least some to the people who lived here, as much as the bad police, and Miss Crawford went and scolded Robbie or one of the Shaw boys from time to time, but what were they going to do? Chances were already poor they’d get police protection if they needed it, but they’d be poorer if they didn’t play along, and everyone knew it.
    Yes, things took time, Miss Crawford thought as she trundled her grocery cart along, but sometimes, like now, she wished the time had already come. She walked the long way home, because over around the other side of this block, that was like the Wild West over there. Drug dealer there by the name of C-4—wasn’t even no name, but she guessed it was supposed to be tough—he let his crew do anything they wanted. She wasn’t scared of him, but she wasn’t stupid neither, and more than one time C-4’s crew was out there shooting rats in the empty lot. Bullets bounced around, didn’t they? Miss Crawford would rather take a dozen extra steps home than get shot by crossing where some punk thought he saw a creature uglier than him. Every now and again, somebody went and called the police. Didn’t help. Even if they were good police and not rotten ones, by the time they got there all the guns were hidden, or at least lying on the ground. Being caught with a gun, that was one crime it was hard to talk your way out of in Newark. Which didn’t mean the gangbangers had no guns, of course they did, every last useless one of them. It only meant they paid some attention to not getting caught.
    Now, over here on this side of the block, that drug dealer Bigmouth, right there on that corner with the knit cap down over his forehead, Miss Crawford could ignore him like he deserved. She knew that boy when he was a baby, she watched him grow up on these streets. Rashawn was his name, though Miss Crawford couldn’t remember the last time she heard anyone use it. His momma, she wasn’t no good, with her men and her liquor, and all her babies had to drag themselves up because she wasn’t helping. That didn’t give Bigmouth an excuse, neither a reason, for being the way he was. It gave Miss Crawford something, though. Whenever she started to get afraid of him, she remembered him running down the street in his diapers. Then she could just walk on by.
    Bigmouth anyway, he thought she was too poor to bother with and too feeble to bother him. She knew it, and it suited her, but he didn’t feel the same way about Leteesha Monroe’s oldest boy and that did not suit Miss Crawford at all. That was a promising child right there, a boy who could write poetry and nice stories, he played basketball and he could sing too. He’d be in middle school next year and he could go on to college and be somebody, if the somebody he wanted to be wasn’t more and more like Bigmouth every day. The car and the bling and the gun, that was what the Monroe boy saw, that was what all the children saw. Wasn’t easy to tell them to work hard and stay in school when it was easy for them to stand on street corners,